on a whim I decided to play fast and loose with fate and buy the first graphics card that shows
up in my local Craigslist used section and it seemed like fate was on my side for this
video because I very nearly bankrupted myself but before we look at the graphics card that I
did end up getting if you like my t-shirt and you also want to be transparent about
the loser that you are go check out the merch store with the link in the description below
[Music] thank you foreign
straightforward we just go to computer parts oh that is a dodgy listing of a very old Quadro I
love how they just used the stock tech power up photos of it that's always very promising but at
least it wasn't an RTX 4090 so I don't have to like mortgage my cat or whatever funnily enough
I did actually scroll further down the listings and there was an RTX 4090 just a couple graphics
cards lower although in hindsight considering how the last couple of days have gone I would
have happily bought the RTX 4090 instead [Music] okay the graphics card is in that package which
according to Anna who actually did the Craigslist Alleyway knife battling for the graphics card she
bought it from a man wearing silk pajamas at like three on a Tuesday afternoon so he is
clearly living the life [Music] okay so apparently we're starting off with the back where we've got
some some heatsink for the back of the vrm it does also have an SLI finger so if pajama man happens
to find another one of these to sell we could run them in Sri wow this old Nvidia Quadro FX 4400 is
in pretty good condition considering that it was launched back in 2005 for 2400 US dollars so the
35 Canadian dollars we paid for it was clearly a bug oh wow okay there's actual copper heatsink
under there that's very nice so once I'm done with this graphics card I can melt the heatsink
down and sell it for like three pennies oh on the fan we've got a Nvidia logo that Harkens back to
my youth is a foul-mouthed Drifter that is an old Nvidia logo oh there's this weird connector
on the board that I don't recognize it looks a little bit like an internal audio header but I'm
not sure let me know in the comment section down below if you recognize that and then finally at
this end we get a single six pin supplemental power can connector so yeah it shouldn't draw
too much juice and then on the back we've got rear i o That's nice and period correct we've just got
two DVI ports and I think that's an S Video Port so considering the advanced age of this random
Craigslist pickup we're not going to be able to play any remotely modern games on it I think it
only supports DirectX 9 and I don't even think that's going to be the limiting factor for stuff
we can play on this geriatric card but before we worry about that let me quickly tear it down
it is now the future and I officially hate this octogenarian graphics card but anyway uh let's
tear it down and have a closer look at its insides that comes off first oh I see and then we have the
heatsink under there that is a pretty serious bit of copper in that heatsink which is something you
don't really see in modern graphics cards it's mostly aluminum fin arrays so that's pretty cool
[Music]
someone broke and then there's the heatsink now first off the thermal paste is bone dry I actually
think that is the original Factory application it's just a solid Billet of copper that they
milled the heatsink out so this this is the bit that I'm gonna melt down later this is a whopping
512 megabytes of gddr3 you know you gotta get a lot of vram for that two thousand four hundred
dollar asking price oh and there is our Korea GPU very interesting uh as far as I understand
this is actually the same GPU that's in the 6800 GT this is just like the quadro version of that
card and the die was made using 130 nanometer process compared to like seven nanometers today
oh now here is the back of that heatsink with thermal pads that make some real complete contact
with the video memory under that so these are actually the same memory modules as the
ones that weren't covered by a heatsink the only reasonable explanation is that this discrepancy
exists as a metaphor for classism it's always really cool having a look at old Hardware like
this even if it is a massive pain in the ass to interact with which I think brings me to the next
part of the video [Music] now first things first I'm curious to see how Windows 10 deals with this
18 year old graphics card so I'm gonna drop it in this test system and just see what happens
a few moments later it is refusing to post so clearly gotta figure something else out
I'm gonna use this x58 based platform which is one of the older platforms I have lying around
it's still many years the junior of that FX 4400 but yeah hopefully it works in here
that took weirdly long to set up so hopefully it works I'm going to be pretty upset if it
doesn't let's the next minute was tense with posting seeming less and less likely until oh
yes oh it scared me a bit there now it may have posted but Windows 10
refused to boot which I was kind of expecting considering the age of the
graphics card so I decided to install Windows 7 to see if that worked instead
[Music] oh yeah this motherboard has killer ethernet in it so it doesn't have drivers
okay I need to go download that on a different PC system check it passed that bit driver was
not successfully installed uh now in case it wasn't already clear from my defeated demeanor
at this point I had already spent most of the day struggling with this graphics card
why is this system behaving like it's relapsing it's a new Windows 7 install
on a beast system what's going on I actually just realized I plugged the
SSD into a SATA 2 Port so that may be why the system has been so infuriatingly slow
so when I plugged it into the sata 3 port it it wouldn't boot and then I plugged it back
into the SATA 2 port another Windows install is broken at which point I reinstalled Windows 7 but
nothing changed drivers still wouldn't install and the system just generally behaved like it
was recently lobotomized I'm gonna test it with a different graphics card to see if Windows 7 is
still going to throw a tantrum with this GTX 960 just to get a better indication of where
we stand with this FX 4400 quite concerningly the moment I plugged the GTX 960 in everything worked
perfectly I'm not surprised about that at all but because it doesn't have Alma plugged into
it the system's super happy all of a sudden yeah whatever I'm done for today [Music] ah
it is now the next morning and I've recovered from the desire to blend the graphics card down
and feed the GPU smoothie to pajama man and I've come up with a new plan as well I went and found
an LGA 775 based system I think there's a Core 2 Duo in here I can't quite remember but we'll
find out soon enough and I'm gonna use this with the old FX 4400 well this time it's the
rest of the system not working so I I guess that's a nice change of pace I then tested
four other system configurations none of which worked with the FX 4400 which meant I had to
abandon all dignity and crawl back to the x58 system but this time trying something different
now getting Windows XP running on this system was a complete nightmare which I'm not going to walk
you through because otherwise this video is going to be two hours long but basically trying to find
a working Windows XP ISO to download in 2022 feels like covering yourself in chum and going swimming
in Hearts by and then getting the Windows virus Edition that you just downloaded to install is
even more harrowing here's a brief explanation of the process from crazy David at this point it
feels like I've been trapped in purgatory with it for the last two days this really is my idea
of hell because every single step something breaks and then the way in which it breaks
requires like three steps to fix the broken thing and then at every one of those steps something
breaks as well so it's like a fractal of just crap breaking the whole time but at the end of quite a
while I managed to get Windows XP working install graphics card drivers and get a game running yes
something has launched we even have an overlay okay things are going very well now we are we
are cooking with gas here and we're getting over a hundred and forty frames per second
at 1080p so this pajama man graphics card is a complete monster I want to set the graphics up
a bit more whoa even with cranked Graphics in lock on modern era combat we're getting about
50 frames per second this graphics card is a monster apparently it's zero percent you tonight
lization okay it's definitely running on the graphics card though because we don't have an
igpu other than that we're only using about 140 Megs of our video memory and the temperatures
are sitting at about 53 degrees Celsius so that copper heatsink is putting in some work oh yeah
let's see this detail look at that ground oh yes we've got trees there's smoke we've
got some buildings so with that what did we learn in today's video well if you buy a graphics card
from a man wearing silk pajamas you're likely going to end up wrestling great whites in the
dodgier corners of the internet and until the next video thank you for watching bye
[Music]